


Collateral Damage

by DetroitBabe



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, POV Alternating, Timeline Shenanigans, ambiguous all of it tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-01-30 09:34:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12650913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetroitBabe/pseuds/DetroitBabe
Summary: Chet Desmond disappears and reappears.





	Collateral Damage

**Author's Note:**

> Just a next installment in this one long, plotless stream-of-consciousness mess that all my TP fics are.  
> Also, I wrote it after reading TFD and then forgot about the draft for a month, whoopsie. It would have been deleted in two days. I could of course copy it and rewrite it in a new draft, but hell, it's been long enough. Whatever.

i. (for sorrow)

 

What is the hardest lesson that his work has taught Dale so far? Perhaps this: sometimes solving a mystery doesn’t help anyone. You think your sharp mind will save the world, you think if you can simply crack a puzzle you will win, automatically and absolutely; but then you realize that this victory might be yours alone, and then it suddenly doesn’t feel like much. And this feeling – or rather lack of feeling, for that’s what disappointment really is, an empty space, this hole grows bigger and bigger inside you and you cannot stop it from eating you out. The deadliest slow poison: the doubt, the powerlessness, when your satisfaction is confronted with damage that cannot be repaired, when the supposed justice brings no compensation, no comfort, no resolution.

But in this case, it’s a little more complicated.

He knows who killed Laura Palmer. This town, a rot festering underneath the skin. Her father’s hands and someone/something else’s mind, and in between them a person like a blurred line between a man and a monster. They arrested the man and it never felt like enough. The man has died, and it ended nothing. ( _But it did_ , he tells himself. _You saved some other girl’s life, a victim next in line, a future misery_. But this thought has a shadow, and it says, _so what?_ And he is ashamed for thinking so, but as we have said, it’s complicated. Because evil, even the evil that men do, outlives them – in consequence, in grief, and sometimes in person. And because he has to look her in the eye, and she knows he has failed to save her.

There she/they is/are, the girl/s. Always her, never the same. Golden hair, dark hair, younger, older, blue eyes, white eyes, dead eyes. Garbled words, garbled scream, a mouth to kiss, a mouth that bites. What are girls made of? All their dreams and pains and sorrows.

He wants to talk to her so desperately, although he is not sure what would he say to her. What could he give her? An explanation? An apology? It’s an empty speculation anyway; his body doesn’t comply, all the thoughts formed in his mind never find a voice. They are like flies, trapped in a room with the windows closed, they whirl and buzz and smash against the glass, but they cannot get out.

 

ii. (for joy)

 

It feels terrifying and it feels glorious, like something too good to be true, but all feelings are buried under this haze that his mind is wrapped in, all his thoughts drowned by the white noise of blood rushing in his ears as he runs deeper into the trees. In the dark his goal is like a light, bright and sharp and guiding, drawing him in, and the desire to succeed and the fear of failing don’t let him stop until he already can hear her, unknowingly rushing to meet him. He waits in silence.

As she steps up hesitantly to take his outstretched hand, as she takes it and follows him ( _home_ , he says, and she believes, for he is a dream, and dreams are truer than reality), she looks at him the way one might look at an angel: with fear, with reverence, with a recognition underneath confusion; with hope, with relief, with an instinct to turn away. That’s what he sees in her eyes, but her eyes are wide open and filled with tears, they reflect like a mirror, so perhaps he is seeing more of himself there. His terror, his bliss, indistinguishable from hers, fates superimposed, a fate overcome.

 

iii. (for a girl)

 

Tears of joy and tears of pain taste different, but look almost the same. There’s no one there to tell them apart anyway, save for the trees, black and grey; silent, but still reverberating with the sound of her suddenly slipping away, with her scream and the noises of disturbed birds.

Stand on the seashore, lean and take a drop. Just one drop, hanging from your fingertip, an infinitesimally small fraction of the immensity of water before you; so small it’s close to nothing. But you cannot lift it without touching and breaking the surface. And the sea won’t overflow from the ripples you make, but something is disturbed nonetheless.

 

iv. (for a boy)

 

For a moment, when it happens, he thinks about having left Sam behind, weighing the now irrelevant possibilities: a hand to catch him before he falls – someone to help him or to be dragged down with him. Maybe it’s better this way, no collateral damage on his conscience. And then, for a while, he doesn’t think about anything, his mind shutting down: what happens is too much to process. In itself, it doesn’t seem like much at all: a world reduced to three colours, black and white and red, two men, him and the other one, one room, a universe of its own. It’s the context that’s overwhelming.

“This is the waiting room,” he’s told before being left alone; and so he waits, until his patience runs thin and he begins pacing the room, back and forth, each swing of this pendulum-like movement bringing him closer to the edges. And then he decides to leave, grabs the heavy velvet curtains and shoves them apart and walks out into the same room.

(It’s not just identical. Somehow, inexplicably, irrefutably, he knows it’s the same room.)

There’s nothing for him to do but wait, but he keeps walking pointlessly, in circles, focusing all his attention on the rhythm of his footsteps on the panelled floor, measured, mesmerizing, so that he doesn’t think too much about what exactly he is waiting for.

 

v. (for silver)

 

[What was his name? Erm… Dammit.]

[Cooper. Dale Cooper.

Sorry. Gets harder to remember the details.]

[Where was I? Oh, right. Cooper. He used to make those tapes, they were case files as much as his personal diary. I think remembering this gave me the idea. Now, in a way, I’m preserving his memory too. Just in case. Here’s to you, little brother – I hope you’re luckier than me.]

[Right. It’s March, the eighteenth, nineteen-eighty-nine, at least according to the daily paper and the guy who sold it to me. Which means I lost almost a month, since –

Since what? What happened in February? Why did I say this? Nothing happened in February. Nothing ever happened. I had a boring, meaningless desk job…

No. That’s not right.]

[Okay. Facts only. It’s March, the eighteenth, nineteen-eighty-nine. I’m in Missoula, Montana. About four days ago I was in the middle of nowhere, Montana, and I don’t know how I got there exactly. I remember quitting my job, or maybe getting fired. I vaguely remember smashing my desk, or trying to. I remember packing my bags, getting into my car and driving off into the sunset like a lonesome, pissed cowboy. I can’t pinpoint the date. And then, Montana. I know I said, “facts only”, but I feel like this is important – if not for establishing the chains of events, if not for establishing where I was physically, then at least for establishing where I was mentally. Apparently. I feel almost fine.

I woke up in my car, parked on an empty field on the side of a state highway. I found an empty bottle of cheap whiskey and a few beer cans, also empty, under the seat, which might explain some things.

There’s this old joke, it goes like this: Sherlock Holmes and doctor Watson go for a camping trip. One morning, they wake up and Holmes says: look around, my dear Watson. What can you deduce from what you can see? And Watson, eager to impress his friend, starts going on about what time it is judging by the position of the sun, and how it must have been raining all night because his clothes are soaking wet, and so on, but Holmes stops him: no, you fool. Someone stole our tent.

It was a bit like that. I woke up and, fighting headache and nausea worse than any hangover I’ve ever experienced, I started thinking about what time it is, and where to go next, and how hardly no one drives down this road, and it took me quite a while to ask myself where the hell did the motel go.

I mean, of course, forgetting what must’ve been a drunken dream in lieu of concrete reality of my immediate surroundings seems like a much-needed good sign, but I was so sure I hadn’t been sleeping in my car that night. I remember a motel room, dilapidated and dark; I remember that time my TV broke down and I replaced it with the old black-and-white one, and I would dream in black and white whenever I fell asleep watching it, and I remember remembering it then, in that motel room, all black and white and unreal in the moonlight. I remember I couldn’t sleep because I kept hearing noises, and I went out to track the source and tell them to knock it off, but I ended up wandering into somewhere else, and – oh, I don’t know. A bottle of whisky and several cans of beer, remember.

But I woke up in the car. Maybe I drove off – _that_ would be scary, frankly, in the state I seemed to be in. Anyway, I couldn’t start the car again, and I’ve waited for ages until someone drove past and agreed to tow me all the way to the nearest outpost of civilisation. The guy at the gas station made me a pot of coffee, poked and prodded at my car for about two hours, and eventually deemed it irreparable – “beats me how it got this far”, he said – and offered to buy it for scrap parts. Eventually, I agreed. Some trucker took me as far as Missoula, and here I am. Make of it what you want.]

[I knew there was something else. I went through the earlier recordings to erase them, and there I heard it: Dale Cooper. I was saying, Dale Cooper’s tapes gave me the idea to make these.

I don’t know a Dale Cooper.

I… remember him.]

 

vi. (for gold)

 

[I remember some other things, too, _earlier_ things, and I think to get the full picture of the situation I should mention them as well. Sift through this flotsam and jetsam for some more information. Why am I talking about my life as if I was a detective on a case? Old habits, I guess.

 _Whose_ habits? I’m a clerk. An ex-clerk. Ain’t I?]

[Facts only. Well, I’m not sure I have any facts left up my sleeve; memories, then, the least vague ones. I remember being in Washington – the state, not the city – investigating a murder. My partner was Sam Stanley –

Hm, here’s a thought: does he exist? Is he himself, as I remember him? Does he remember me? Would he recognize me, if I found him?]

It’s coming back, a lot of it, and then it escapes him, as if he was trying to catch smoke, his fingers go right through it and the more he grasps at it the more it dissipates, and he feel like he’s not talking fast enough to record it all before it’s lost, the elusive sliver of reality made unreal.

[Blue rose. Those words just came into my mind, and I don’t know what they mean, but I feel like they’re important… It’s not going too well, is it?]

[No, wait a second –]

 

vii. (for a secret never to be told?)

 

He is home. He thinks of this place as home – why wouldn’t he? It’s been his home for quite some time now. Here, the dreams don’t disturb him anymore, and even those days in Montana seem like another dream too, dissolving and disappearing in the morning, safely non-existent.

His mother had this ring with a dark, deep brown gemstone. Well, it was really just a piece of crystal glass – not even a rhinestone – but cut like a large brilliant, multi-faceted and shimmering. When he was a child, when mother sat in the old rocking chair with him on her lap, he’d always try to take it off her finger, to put it to his eye and look through the glass at the magic world. That’s what Montana looked like: a kaleidoscope, mind-reeling hall of mirrors drenched in the tan hues of whiskey to fall asleep and coffee to wake up.

But that’s behind him now, and the only tangible proof of it left is the tape recorder and the box of cassettes on his living room table. A chronicle of a fractured reality or a broken mind – which it was, he still hasn’t decided for sure. Just as he still hasn’t decided what to do with them. He could stash them away in the attic – how much time would have to pass until he forgets about them? He has thought about burning them in the backyard, but he couldn’t bring himself to doing it yet, even though he doesn’t want to listen to them again either, and he doubts he’ll show them to anybody anytime soon. And if in a few years everyone will only make CDs or something and no one will ever listen to cassette tapes anymore, it will probably be for the better. Why preserve this past that never was, why cling to it on the off-chance that it might have really happened? And even if it did, why not scrap it and start over? Maybe that’s what is meant to be.

At sundown, he stands behind the house, staring at the bonfire in a rusty metal bucket, and listens to his own voice talk. It seemed only fair to give the old man one last chance to speak for himself before condemning him to this death in ashes and molten plastic and stinking smoke.

[…I remember asking what it meant, after the first case we’ve worked together, and I still remember the answer. I knew from the start that there was a story behind it, you could just tell, and, as I came to realise, I was the first one the story was told to, eventually, with reluctance, and a sort of – reverence. I can’t describe it any other way. He told it as if it was a religious experience, intimate and bigger than personal at the same time. He seemed… shaken up, underneath all the cool exterior. And, well, it must’ve gotten to me too, since I still remember it, even as I have already forgotten the man’s name. And I remember what he said – maybe not word for word, but the gist of it, yeah.

He said something like, _you don’t believe me yet, but you already know I’m telling the truth. Hang on to that. That’s how it is, from now on, for as long as you make it. And_ –]

He flips the switch, cutting the voice off; rewinds the tape, slowly counting to ten – not out loud, only in his head.

[…Would he recognize me, if I found him?]

He cuts it off again, this time for good, his mind made up.


End file.
